This class encapsulates NCBI Entrez queries. It can be used to store a list of GI numbers, to translate an Entrez query expression into a list of GI numbers, or to count the number of terms that would be returned by a query. Once created, the query object can be passed to a Bio::DB::GenBank object in order to retrieve the entries corresponding to the query.

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This method creates a new query object. Typically you will specify a -db and a -query argument, possibly modified by -mindate, -maxdate, or -reldate. -mindate and -maxdate specify minimum and maximum dates for entries you are interested in retrieving, expressed in the form YYYY/MM/DD. -reldate is used to fetch entries that are more recent than the indicated number of days.

If you provide an array reference of IDs in -ids, the query will be ignored and the list of IDs will be used when the query is passed to a Bio::DB::GenBank object's get_Stream_by_query() method. A variety of IDs are automatically recognized, including GI numbers, Accession numbers, Accession.version numbers and locus names.

By default, the query will collect only the first 100 IDs and will generate an exception if you call the ids() method and the query returned more than that number. To increase this maximum, set -maxids to a number larger than the number of IDs you expect to obtain. This only affects the list of IDs you obtain when you call the ids() method, and does not affect in any way the number of entries you receive when you generate a SeqIO stream from the query.

-db option values:

The most commonly used databases are:
protein
nucleotide
nuccore
nucgss
nucest
unigene
An up to date list of database names supported by NCBI eUtils is
always available at:
http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/einfo.fcgi?
However, note that not all of these databases return datatypes that
are parsable by Bio::DB::GenBank